Dec 17th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Scott Karp makes a good point in a post today about Nick Denton taking the helm at Gawker again (something I also wrote about earlier today). It’s pretty much the same thing I’ve been saying over and over when I talk to companies — including media companies — about blogs and social media. Let me say it again: Blogs are just a publishing system. Just because something is called a “blog” doesn’t actually imply anything positive or negative about its content (or lack thereof).
Blogs can be used to practice journalism, they can be used to practice drive-by celebrity character assassination, they can be used as a gigantic time-sink so as to keep people from doing real work (and occasionally, as in the case of The Smoking Gun, they can accomplish all three at once). They can be about serious subjects, with well thought-out opinions, or they can be the blitherings of a know-nothing with a typewriter.
Asking whether blogs can be journalism is like asking whether pencils can be used for journalism, or whether people who type can be journalists. Sure, they can, but that doesn’t mean they always are. You could make the same statement and replace the word “blog” with the word “newspaper.” Do all newspapers practice the rigorous, fact-based, dual-sourced journalism people think of when they use the word? Hardly.
What Nick Denton is looking for seems to be the prototype of a new kind of journalist, practicing something close to what Jeff Jarvis calls “networked” journalism (which Jay Rosen is also working on). An excerpt from the job posting Nick put up for a Gawker reporter:
“At its most elevated, the new Gawker hire may experiment with a new form of reporting, unique to online, in which ideas are floated, appeals made to the readers, and the story assembled over the course of several items, from speculation, and tips from users.”
Nick’s brand of Fleet Street-style journalism may not be to everyone’s taste, but there’s no question that it’s journalism. The fact is that until recently, only a small group of people had the tools required to engage in journalism. Now, the tools are virtually free, not to mention instantaneous. The combination of those two things has up-ended the journalism business — such as it was — and continues to do so.
Dec 7th, 2007 | Blogs, Social Media | No Comments
I know that the impulse behind it is a valuable one, but I just can’t seem to get excited about the launch of the Business Blog Council, or what should probably be called the Big Business Blog Council. In fact, my thoughts on it run pretty close to Dave Taylor’s — it sounds like a gigantic waste of time to me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for businesses getting with the social-media program. But I don’t think getting a whole bunch of gigantic corporations into a room together is really going to help.
I really want to like this idea. Lionel Menchaca of Dell is a super guy — we had him on a panel at the last mesh and I really enjoyed meeting him — and he really gets what social media is all about, as his post on the Blog Council shows. But even if businesses need a secret clubhouse where they can share ideas about blogging, which I’m not sure they do, I still don’t see why it has to just be for big businesses. Why not all businesses?
I know, I know — people keep saying that businesses like Coke and Dell and Cisco have different needs because they are bigger. But I’m not sure I buy that. What difference does it make whether you have 100 employees or 10,000? Both companies will still have to think about disclosure and legalities and all those kinds of things. Much as it pains me to admit it, I think Scoble is right — just get out there and start doing it.
The biggest risk with something like the Big Business Blog Council — apart from it just reinforcing how big businesses don’t really get it, as Mark Hopkins points out at Mashable — is that it turns into something that starts with the word “cluster” and rhymes with the word “duck.”
Dec 2nd, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, gave a long and passionate speech in London last week at a memorial event hosted by The Guardian — the full text of which is here — and in it he said many valuable and wise things about the practice of journalism (although he kind of glossed over stuff like Jayson Blair and Judith Miller, but whatever). However, he also said a couple of really dumb things about blogs and social media. Those dumb things are ably skewered by Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine, who Keller referred to in his speech.
In a nutshell, the NYT executive editor says Jeff and his ilk are of the view that bloggers and “citizen journalists” can more or less replace traditional journalists — and then Keller goes on to say that can’t possibly happen, because journalists like those at the Times have standards, training, put themselves in harm’s way in pursuit of the story, etc. etc. The only problem with all that, of course, is that hardly anyone — and especially Jeff Jarvis — is arguing anything like that.
As Jeff notes — and Dan Gillmor does as well — Keller’s argument is a straw man, designed to pump up traditional journalism at the expense of some pseudo-horde of random “citizen journalists” who want to take their jobs. Why can’t we admit that in some cases, people who haven’t been anointed with the title “journalist,” either by someone at a journalism school or by an editor at an established news outlet, can at least help to produce journalism? Why is that so hard?
Nov 19th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
That headline is meant as a joke, by the way. But like many jokes, it has some truth at the center of it. Do I like to see my posts linked to on Techmeme? Sure I do — and I get the sense that Fred Wilson does too, even though he’s a fantastically rich and well-respected venture capitalist who presumably has lots of other things that make him feel great about what he’s doing. And I think Dave Winer likes to see himself on there too, even though he has a kind of love/hate co-dependent relationship.
I think Fred makes a good point about the site drawing more from other places — places that aren’t really blogs in the strict sense, in that they aren’t written by a single individual. But is that a bad thing? I’m not sure it is. I suppose it would be if you were used to a Techmeme that consisted mostly of your friends, which I think Fred (and probably Dave) are suggesting it used to be. But isn’t that a little like the guy who has a great mountain view from his house, and then complains that all these new people are moving in and wrecking it? Why shouldn’t they get some of that view too?
Not a great analogy, maybe. But I think Fred is overstating the case a bit too. Jeff Jarvis is still on Techmeme regularly, and as a headline post plenty of the time. Rex Hammock is on there plenty too. Calacanis might not be, but only because all he seems to write about lately is Mahalo and (occasionally) fat-blogging. But maybe all those FOFs (friends of Fred) aren’t there as much — and I think that’s okay. We’re getting some new bloggers that are adding new points of view, like Ashkan at WatchMojo and Allen Stern at Centernetworks and ParisLemon and The Last Podcast.
Are we getting USA Today and places like that too? Sure we are — because blogs and media are blending. And that’s as it should be. Blogs aren’t just for the geeks and blognoscenti anymore. Is that going to boost the noise in the signal-to-noise ratio? Perhaps. But there’s more signal out there too. And yes, Techmeme is going to encourage people to “game” the system to try and push their posts up. So what? Don’t click on them. There’s still lots of great opinions and ideas out there — more than there ever were, in fact.
Nov 13th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | 4 Comments
Ethan Kaplan of blackrimglasses, the Warner Music Group technology shaman and all-around smart guy, has a great post up about the pile-on effect that we all see from time to time on Techmeme, as well as a related problem: the incessant desire for “scoops” and “exclusives” that companies use to play blogs off against each other — using embargos and other cheap parlour tricks to get blogs to parrot whatever marketing slogan happens to come down the pike.
I know that Mike Arrington at TechCrunch and Pete Cashmore at Mashable try hard not to get sucked into that vortex, and I’m sure that Richard MacManus and the gang at Read/Write Web do too, but it’s hard when everyone wants to be first. As Mike said at our mesh conference in May, being first is easier — if you’re not first, then you have to try harder to add value somehow. If you’re first, well… you’re first.
The problem, as Ethan describes in his own inimitable fashion, is that being first hardly matters any more. It’s not like anyone is going to be first for more than a second or two, and then the great tsunami of coverage will descend on the subject until it is obliterated beneath a pile of Techmeme.com posts. As Ethan says:
“It’s like is holding back an immense amount of water pressure then releasing it. In the end, can you tell who the first drop to hit you was? No. You only know that you are wet and uncomfortable.”
Well said. It’s unlikely we will ever get rid of the desire to be first — I think it’s one of the most primal desires of the journalist (and in using that term I include bloggers) — but I hope that more and more people will choose to focus on the issues that need to be talked about, instead of just the latest release of a Facebook/Google/MySpace widget that aggregates Web 2.0 social bookmarking spreadsheets or whatever.
